National legislation with a global impact

I wasn’t born in 1974, so I’ve had to take the opinion of others as to what the events of note were.

Among them were Lord Lucan disappearing, the Watergate scandal hitting the US, and The Exorcist proving to be a big hit in cinemas following its release.

But, for our profession, the significance is that it was the year the Health and Safety at Work Etc Act (HASAWA) came into effect. It was a year when 28 people were killed and 36 injured when a chemical plant near Flixborough, Lincolnshire, exploded.

A lot has changed in the past half a century since all of this happened, and it has made the world a very different place to live and work. However, one thing that has not changed is harm. We still harm people through work activity and workers still suffer life-changing ill health, injury, and loss of life as a result of inadequate health and safety measures.

Just consider the Buncefield Oil Storage Depot explosion in 2005, 31 years on, which injured 40 people, fortunately with no fatalities. So, 50 years on, what’s the true impact of the HASAWA?

Impact

To view its importance, we don’t really need to look any further than how long it has lasted. There are many pieces of legislation that change every two to three years. By contrast, the HASAWA has lasted 50 years, so this suggests that it was well written as its core principles have stood the test of time.

In addition to this, we can also consider how it has been imitated around the world – and they do say that imitation is the highest form of flattery. In Singapore, for example, it has been an inspiration behind their Workplace Safety and Health Act 2006, with a particular focus on the UK Act’s principle of making the person who creates the risk responsible for managing it.

Of course, legislation alone doesn’t make workplaces safe and healthy. One might argue that the workplaces of the UK are healthier and safer than they were. You may evidence this by the significant reduction in fatalities at work since the Act came into force. You might therefore imply this was a direct result of the Act itself. I would argue that technological change has had a greater impact in reducing exposure to harm and removing the need for people to carry out dangerous work.

However, simply measuring a reduction in loss of life is too crude a measure. It misses the point that the Act was designed to not only keep people safe from harm but it was designed to protect people's health and their safety.

So, we’re failing to enact the intent of the Act. Why do I say this? The number of people who are diagnosed with an illness because they were exposed to something harmful at work dwarfs the number of people who lose their lives due to a workplace accident. The fatality figures have plateaued somewhat over the past decade, with the annual figures from the Health and Safety Executive tending to reveal that in the region of 130 to 140 people are dying in workplace accidents. Compare that to the 1.8 million people suffering from a work-related illness! How did we miss the health in health and safety?

This shows us that more needs to be done to continue to improve health and safety standards in workplaces. Something has to change that enables a reduction in cases of ill health as a result of work and serious injuries and fatalities from accidents. This has to be possible.

One beacon of hope, and one of the obvious opportunities in front of us, is the rate of change that we are experiencing in how and where we work. These changes are continuing at pace, especially with regard to the advances in technologies and also social change. These and other impacts on our profession are featured in IOSH’s Towards a safe and healthy future of work report, which it jointly published with Arup earlier in 2024.

*Originally published by Safety and Health Practitioner